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Petition

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By Traci Brimhall
In the temple, a pear blackens in a statue's palm.
Birds steal the grain. A man climbs the steps
holding his severed hand, but no miracle occurs.

His body refuses to reach out and claim what it lost.
A woman in a white dress waits to be overshadowed
as she plucks her eyelashes—one for the horses,

one for the rain, one for the hair on the back
of her lover's hands. She wants her virtue
restored, to return to a morning when her skin

was new and unwounded, when her mouth still fit
her mother's breast. You came to ask if it's true,
if angels weep until their faces become human,

and if the dead can escape their tombs, then—
You trap wind as it enters the statue's mouth,
and command it to rise, walk.

Traci Brimhall, "Petition" from Our Lady of the Ruins. Copyright © 2012 by Traci Brimhall.  Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Source: Our Lady of the Ruins (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2012)
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Petition

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By Traci Brimhall

  • Biography

    Poet Traci Brimhall earned a BA at Florida State University, an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, and a PhD at Western Michigan University. In her lyric poems, she often merges the everyday with surreal imagery to meditate on themes of sacrifice and transformation. She is the author of the poetry collections Our Lady of the Ruins (2012), selected by Carolyn Forché for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (2010), winner of a Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and a finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award. Brimhall collaborated with Brynn Saito on the chapbook Bright Power, Dark Peace (2013), and her poetry has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2014 (edited by Terrance Hayes).
     
    Reviewing Our Lady of the Ruins for Kenyon Review Online, poet Mary Catherine Popa described Brimhall’s work as “tight, dynamic, and inventive,” observing “Brimhall proves that in disillusionment there...

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